India's top court slammed top officials Tuesday for dragging their feet in forming a new government in the national capital more than eight months after the last administration resigned in chaos.

New Delhi, a city of some 17 million people, has been without a proper government since February, when the capital's firebrand chief minister Arvind Kejriwal quit to protest the blocking of an anti-corruption bill.

Indian officials were preparing Monday to evacuate residents and stockpile food as they braced for another "very severe cyclonic storm" due to slam into the country's west coast and neighboring Pakistan.

Cyclone Nilofar, building in the Arabian Sea, is due to hit India's Gujarat state and Pakistan's southern coastal areas on Friday morning, the Indian Meteorological Department said.

India's Hindu nationalist government on Saturday cleared long-delayed projects worth $13.1 billion to modernize the nation's aging Soviet-era military hardware and boost its domestic defense industry, a report said.

The move underscores the desire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to update the country's military as it looks to defend itself, especially after recent deadly border clashes with Pakistan and a tense stand-off with Chinese troops.

India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the festival of Diwali Thursday with a visit to the disputed Kashmir region to rally the morale of troops after recent deadly clashes with Pakistan.

Modi, who also visited victims of floods that devastated parts of Kashmir last month, met soldiers based on a Himalayan glacier as he bolstered his Hindu nationalist credentials in what is India's only Muslim-majority state.

Malala Yousafzai, the child rights activist and youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, received the Liberty Medal Tuesday and pledged her $100,000 award to education in her homeland Pakistan.

Yousafzai won the annual prize from the National Constitution Center for her "courage and resilience in the face of adversity and for serving as a powerful voice for those who have been denied their basic human rights and liberties," the NCC said.  

An explosion at a firecracker factory in southern India killed at least eight people on Monday, a day before the start of a major festival, reports said.

Fireworks are a major feature of celebrations during the five-day Hindu festival of Diwali, which begins on Tuesday.

Indian and Pakistani troops traded cross-border fire Sunday, officials said, the latest in a series of clashes that began earlier this month and have claimed at least 20 civilian lives.

No one was injured in the latest incident, which according to a Pakistani army statement began when Indian troops resorted to "unprovoked" fire across the border that separates Indian-held Kashmir and Pakistan's Punjab province.

Pakistan's powerful army chief vowed Saturday to thwart any "aggression" against the country, in a thinly-veiled warning to arch rival India after a spate of deadly cross-border firing incidents in the disputed Kashmir region.

At least 20 civilians have been killed and thousands on both sides of the de facto border have fled their homes since October 6, which marked the beginning of some of the worst frontier shelling in years.

India's top court granted bail Friday to a powerful south Indian film star-turned-politician jailed last month for corruption, a ruling that sparked jubilation in her home state.

Jayalalithaa Jayaram, 66, an ex-film star and a longtime head of Tamil Nadu, was convicted last month of having land, gold and other assets vastly exceeding her income in a case that had dragged on for nearly two decades, and sentenced to four years in jail.

India successfully test-fired its first domestically built nuclear-capable long-range cruise missile Friday, marking another step in building up the country's defense prowess. 

The "Nirbhay", or "fearless", missile blasted off from a mobile launcher at the Integrated Missile Test Range in Chandipur in the eastern state of Orissa, the Press Trust of India reported.